Does Socialism Signify?

Abstract

We face a dramatic array of new social problems, vexing new problems of the natural and social environment which seem to require political forms of response. Yet the institutional as well as rhetorical fabric of political life needs to be substantially rewoven before we can begin to drape these new problems of everyday life in a mantle of political solicitude. We presently experience an increasingly toxic natural environment, decaying wage and employment structures, unstable mutations of the traditional family, as well as potentially dangerous objects of daily consumption, from TV to drugs. Such problems lie beyond the bounds of conventional political responses. Mainstream political parties are on the front lines in this situation. Their strategies, be they conservative, moderate, or liberal, have all been tried at various times, and found wanting. It should, thus, have been no surprise when both major party candidates in the 1988 presidential election chose a strategy of rhetorical transcendance and denial of the most fearful social phenomena. Accurately construing themselves as impotent in the face of the drug problem, pollution, and various forms of racial and social injustice, each attempted to distance himself, and us, from these: Noreiga is a bad man in a corrupt Caribbean society, Chernobyl was a bad accident in a poorly administered Communist nuclear plant, the Holocaust was a terrible event of racial hatred from which we have all gained a greater appreciation of our common humanity. The very real, everyday problems of social injustice, ecological destruction, and the commodification of lethal vices such as drugs were elided by each candidate, and in their place we were offered political narratives of implacable far off evil-doing and evil-doers. Bush, with his bland, blond presence, won because he was the candidate best able to convey the sense that the individual can always choose to ignore the existence of evil, be it in one's own past history, be it in the next room, be it in the very words in the air in the room in which one sits.